I would think that it’s the lack of display that lets the Shuffle be so small, not a reduction in computation power, so it should be able to act as any other Ipod model.

By the way, how foolish do I feel for spending a good 5 minutes panning the Shuffle when you had just gotten one for your birthday. Oh and I feel even more foolish for not even knowing it was your birthday. So Happy Birthday!

How many bits of passphrase entropy do you think you’re going to get out of the “random” button presses?

Also, are you sure that AES decryption is happening on the device - they could just be decrypting the content on the Mac and then trasmitting the cleartext over an obfuscated channel. Is there any indication that the encryption is based on AES?

This sounds like an interesting project. Have you read this article on iPod firmware?

http://www.ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo/